I would be interested to hear what Kurzweil says about technology and healthcare management. Although medical testing and treatment has become so sophisticated, there has not been much improvement in morbidity and mortality outcomes in the US. I guess this proves that other forces in our technologically advanced country are at play...

I believe technology absolutely can help solve a lot of issues, and I am truly grateful for many insightful inventions! What I disagree with, is that technologists, like Kurzweil, reduce each and every issue to a technological issue. They subsequently claim that—because it is now a technological issue—someone, someday in the not-too-distant future will come along and invent a new technology that solves the issue.

In my opnion this ignores 3 basic aspects:
1. Not every issue is a technological issue. cfr. the recent popular uprisings in the Middle East, the increasing divide between the rich and the poor, the legacy of past irresponsible actions (Bhopal, Tsjernobil, the Gulf oil spill,...)
2. The issues that are technological may not be resolved in an acceptable time frame, simply because the technological knowledge necessary to do so, might not be even remotely existing or sufficient yet, e.g. nuclear fusion.
3. Nearly every technology that is invented to solve a specific problem, in turn creates another problem, e.g. nuclear waste, landfills with e-waste, CO (electric cars still need to get their electricity generated somewhere, mostly in a polluting fuel plant), industrial food production, mass-antibiotics for poultry or cattle, mass-spraying of insecticides, etcetera.

To get a taste of how close IT is to human reasoning, take a look at IBM’s Watson. If it progresses exponentially, we may not need to wait until the late 2020’s to witness the human-level intelligence in a machine that Mr. Kurzweil envisions.

Kurzweil is profoundly optimistic, but he insists on ignoring certain mathematical facts in opposition to ever-increasing rates of growth. As systems grow more complex, they suffer from “combinatorial slowdown” which makes it exponentially more difficult to sustain the same rate of growth. In information technology, this is manifested in the slogan “what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.” Our computers are still as annoyingly slow as ever. Even without the burden of complexity, naturally growing systems always encounter one or more of a myriad of limits, which convert their exponential growth function to a logistic function that incrementally slows down after reaching a peak growth rate. We are already seeing CPU clock rates stop increasing, because it has become too difficult to dissipate the heat that CPUs produce as they move bits around. Few people anticipated this limit as they predicted the continuation of Moore’s law into the indefinite future.

Actually, the biggest enabler and change with IT and overall human life styles will really be with integration of human perceptions with a large “Matrix” so to say.

All the other inputs described here—about solar energy, devices, and information processing are all external to human behaviour and life style. They are all important but they assume that human desires and needs, and our wish to keep on consuming things, will also increase only linearly. Actually the human desires will not just increase exponentially, they will possibly be increasing logarithmically—with a base lot more than just two assumed here.

The end result of all this is just the manifestation of gluttony or materialism gone unbounded. We are currently just seeing this unfold over large populations in this world. Once this really catches on, the situation will really be uncontrollable.

Even currently there are some researchers working to simulate our feelings and experiences with bits and bytes fed into our brains. Virtual reality is just one simpleset manifestation of it all.

When this really expands, logarithmicallly, it will be possible to ‘experience’ everything from taste, smell, or tactile senses that are currently outside our real experiences. Visual and auditory experiences are already old hat.

If (or rather when) this happens, all our current needs of physical movements, food, drink, or all the biological needs will be met only with a fraction of overall effort, material, and costs.

In that situation, there will really be no need for any travel, physical movement, business, or even education. Any individual will get all end results of what all humans crave for by getting just plugged into this “matrix.”

Is that scary? Yes, it may be, but the other alternative is even more terrrifying—with major issues of sustainability, global warming, and all the other ills facing the world today.

It is just a matter of time and well-coordinated effort, but this reality should be much more welcome in today’s gloomy world.

We are making machines to mimic us, soon it seems we will be mimicking the machines. Who knows—the human brain (mind) may also take a exponential leap. It may be worth while to look around to see if there is something happening in this area. Any ideas on where to start?

Thank you for these insights, and for correcting a popular mis-perception about the exponential progress of technologies. Easy to remember: at half-time, around 1% is right on schedule; seven more doublings, we will be there.

As for energy technologies, solar may indeed cover current needs of ours, but what if our demand grows exponentially, too? Kurzweil mentions one of two key technologies that act as constraints in the solar scenario: storage. The other one is transmission. For each, progress follows its own time scale. For storage, we may soon use electric vehicles, but we will pay significant losses, with current technology. Transmission technology needs to improve—faster than our energy demand—to make desert solar power viable. For now, decentralized energy supplies appear more attractive.

In this interview, Kurzweil does not mention two energy sources within reach of current technologies and budgets, and nearly as inexhaustible as solar, yet available on a more user-friendly schedule: geothermal and tidal energy.